The Stars In Her Lashes
by fluggerbutter
Summary: When the Quell was announced, the first one to talk to him wasn't Peeta. It was Effie, pink-haired dolled-up shell-shocked Effie, weeping so much he was sure she'd manage to cry the glitter out of her eyelashes.


The first one to talk to him after it happened wasn't Peeta. It was Effie, pink-haired dolled-up shell-shocked Effie, weeping so much he was sure she'd manage to cry the glitter out of her eyelashes. He told her so.

"Don't be ridiculous," she sobbed. "It's waterproof."

"I know," he said. He reached for the gin at the end of the table and the hologram flickered. It was Effie shaking her head, hair a furious flurry of cotton candy.

"Not now," she said, running the back of her palm across her eyes. She was trying hard but her voice trembled. She couldn't even see past his elbow, he realized, and still she knew what he was grasping at. "Please, not now. Leave the drink, Haymitch."

Like he wasn't already as good as drunk. (He was always as good as drunk. It was, irrevocably, a lifestyle he would never make his way out of.) His fingers hovered by the neck of the bottle, threatening to wrap around and down the thing in one go to fight the depression that rose up in his throat like bile. The existing pool of victors. _The existing pool of victors._ Damn them, damn them to hell; three victors in this village, and Katniss the only female. Katniss! Forget Katniss; he was a victor too, and he could imagine Effie's gaudy floral inch-long nails reaching into that damn fishbowl and swirling around the only two damn pieces of paper in there and picking one up and she'd be making the vainest attempt to smile like she always did, he could see it, and her clementine- or chartreuse- or magenta- or whatever-insane-colour-stained lips would shakily form the sounds that made up his name and she'd declare to the cameras and the Capitol and the uprising districts –

"Haymitch?"

His fingers withdrew from the liquor and he forced himself to look at her.

"All right, Your Majesty, I'll leave the booze. For now. No promises about the state of my sobriety in twenty minutes."

She nodded, sniffing the last vestiges of her tears away. He suddenly felt as if he had rudely walked in on something quite intimate, and the feeling overwhelmed him, because Effie Trinket with her Capitol accent and high high heels and always-ever-impeccable manners should not have called up the old drunk bastard twelve districts away and let him watch her dignity fall down around her. She was a proud woman, Effie.

"I don't need twenty minutes," she said.

"Then tell me, princess, what exactly _do_ you need?"

"I don't know," she said, very quietly, looking away.

His instinctive response to this would have been to get annoyed at her for wasting his time, hang up, down all the gin on the table in one go and pass out so he didn't have to think about all this shit, but that would have done neither of them any good, and he had a feeling that their relationship would consequently never be remedied. Whatever their relationship was_._

Besides, she was breaking. And he wanted no part in her downfall.

Of course, he had broken long ago, so there would be no harm done to him in any case. He would listen. Whatever she had to say, whatever Capitol-bred naïveté and ignorance was being shattered and maneuvered around and slowly understood, he would listen. It was strange, to have her confide in him, and yet – even with a legion of doting stylists and uppity friends and thousands of adoring fans in the city, there was no one else for her to go to. And it suddenly struck him how lonely Effie Trinket must be.

"Everything was supposed to be okay for them," she finally said. She still wasn't looking in his direction. "For you. They were supposed to be safe forever, my victors, and we were going to save you from drinking yourself to death, and train the next tributes and win every year and we were going to have a happy ending. As happy as could be."

Her eyes were welling up with tears again, and he noticed for the first time that her irises were a deep blue.

"It's not fair," she choked. "They never play fair and we never get our happy ending. Oh, _damn_ them, you don't deserve this. None of you deserve this. Damn them all to hell."

He was so surprised by her words that he double-checked the holo, then picked up the gin again and shook the bottle to make sure it hadn't been emptied without his remembering. After confirming it was still full of watered-down alcohol and concluding that no one but Effie would willingly wear a small chandelier for a hairpiece, he half expected her to start apologizing profusely. But she didn't. She stared onwards, towards some sky he couldn't see, some artificial sunlit morning, pent-up fury burning like fire in her ocean eyes.

He didn't even tease her about her newly expanded vocabulary. He couldn't. Instead he just imagined himself taking a swig and said, "Yeah. Damn them." And he smiled a crooked smile. "That was my first thought, too."

"They feed us such bullshit, over here," she said. She leaned her head against something – the wall, he supposed, though it remained out of sight – and somehow maintained the expression of someone who was sighing without letting out a breath. "Keep us distracted with pretty things."

"Like you," he said, without thinking.

She looked at him at last, head jerking towards the camera. "You think I'm pretty?"

"I think you're a distraction." He grinned in spite of it all.

She laughed and titled her head towards the wall again. "Good save, dear."

But now he noticed her eyes were darting. She was watching something moving. It wasn't a wall.

"Effie," he said, "Where are you?"

She hesitated.

"Effie," he repeated, tone warning this time. If she was where he thought she was...

"On the train," she mumbled, slumping slightly against what he now knew to be a window. The little sulk, by all means, indicated shame, but she somehow managed to make the entire motion look graceful anyway.

"_Dammit,"_ he said, not quite shouting but loud enough that it made Effie flinch. He remembered there were bugs doubtlessly littered around the carriage – those Capitol bastards wouldn't let her jump on a train to District Twelve without supervision. He lowered his voice, but the anger stayed. "Goddamn, Effie, you know you can't do that!"

She closed her eyes, taking in a shaky, deep breath. "I know. But I need to see them. I must, before I go ahead and announce their... well, imminent doom is what you used to call it, isn't it?"

"Doom or not," he said harshly, ignoring the sudden pang in his chest at the fact that she clung to his old pessimism, "You can't expect to just waltz down to the Village on your own personal Capitol-Twelve line two weeks early and—"

"Do not _scold_ me, Haymitch," she said, with a glare that made him think twice about retaliating. "Whatever assumptions you may have made, I'm not an idiot. I'm coming under the pretense of fixing up the wedding arrangements, which of course have been severely compromised with this... announcement."

"Oh, great, so you're just giving everyone a woefully obvious cover story and hoping Snow won't call you out on it."

"_The Star-Crossed Lovers of District Twelve's_ entire_ life_ is built upon woefully obvious cover stories," Effie accused. "Snow can't hurt me. The people love me. The people love their victors! This whole city's already distraught over the Quell; if he kills any of us now, even the _Capitol_ will be on the verge of rebelling."

She stared at him defiantly. He searched her expression for any trace of self-doubt and, upon finding none, fell back on his chair with a sigh. She'd thought this through. (And he was proud of her, however unwilling he was to admit it.) "All right," he said. "Fine. But just so you know, I don't think either of those kids are ready to see anyone just yet. Knowing Katniss, she's probably going to zone out until it finally occurs to her that she's going to have to choose her Arena partner."

"Choose?" said Effie, raising stenciled eyebrows in surprise. "I assumed Peeta would be going either way."

"I don't know," Haymitch confessed. "Honestly? She likes the boy more than she likes me, even if it might not look like it. She thinks this whole thing is her fault, and so – I mean, it's sensible – she'll try to protect the one who's got his whole life ahead of him."

"Oh."

There was silence for a while. Familiar silence. They were so used to being together like this.

His voice was light when he finally spoke, as if talking too forcefully would fracture something. "You know what my first thought was, when that son of a bitch announced the Quarter Quell?"

"What?" she asked, when he failed to continue.

"Well, first it was _that son of a bitch._" He tried a chuckle, but it was bitter, and faded quickly. The stoicism that replaced it was cold. "And then I _couldn't_ think. Too damn scared to even pick up a bottle. All I could see was my sixteen-year-old self being reaped.

"Damn, Effie," he added softly. "You even old enough to remember that?"

"I was young," she said, "but I remember. I remember every Game I've ever seen." She paused before asking, "Don't you?"

His fingers wrapped around the neck of the bottle at last, and the draft he took was at least six seconds too long.

She watched him, and her hair seemed less pink now, her clothes less showy. Every mad thing about her was diluted into something normal and average and human.

It was then that he saw her fingers push out from the holo.

And as ridiculous as he felt, he leaned forward and took them.

"Things are going to change this year," he said – it was then that he realized he felt like crying – and the words were more for his benefit than for hers.

"You think so?"

What a tragedy they lived in. He needed a drink.

One more swig and the bottle was nearly finished. "There's a rebellion brewing. I know so."

"But are the odds in our favour?"

Effie Trinket, Capitol-born and Capitol-raised, rising star, fashion icon, had asked aloud the unthinkable question. It was at least the third time that day he'd had to look at her twice.

"No," he said, when he had ceased being speechless. "They're not. They never are."

* * *

Up close, when she blinked, the glitter fell from her lashes like stars.

She had arrived at his doorstop the night after their conversation, on the verge of tears again, in a completely different and equally outrageous outfit from the one she'd been wearing the day before.

She'd wrapped her arms around him and he'd stood there with a bottle in one hand and a glass in the other (both full) and didn't hug her back. This was her payback, he supposed, for last year when he'd stumbled onto the reaping platform fully wasted.

"Hey, darling," he'd said, voice soft. "You gonna come in, or...?"

"Yes," she had said, pulling back quickly and clutching her dress, which, at second glance, he supposed was not _so_ outrageous. For Effie. "Yes, or course. Sorry. I'm just such a mess right now, you know, I—"

"I know," he'd said, holding out the bottle.

She had looked at it.

He had looked at her.

She had taken it. And now they were lying on the couch; blearily, he could see those stars in her eyes, and he was barely aware of the fact that she was in his arms because if he thought about it too much his head hurt in spite of – or perhaps because of – the liquor.

Effie Trinket had smelled of lavender upon entrance. Now she smelled like lavender and whiskey and tears that should never have been shed; it was a familiar smell to him, and it fit her in a sad sort of way. That was the difference between them – she slipped into the smell, like she slipped into a custom pair of shoes, and wore it like it was made for her in the first place; he disguised himself in it, and prayed to God no one ever saw the man hiding beneath.

He ran a hand through her pale purple wig, not daring, not for a moment, to take it off. She'd sleep with thing on before she let him see her real hair. His other hand was around her waist, fingers curled around an empty glass that begged to be released so it could shatter into a million diamond pieces on the floor.

How beautiful that would be, and how bloody.

"You asked me," he murmured, "if I remember."

Her eyes were closed – she was on the verge of sleep – but she nodded slightly, and he could feel the motion beneath his chin.

"I do," he said. "I remember everything. Every tribute, every victor, every arena. Every family. Every death. I remember."

She tilted her head up and opened her eyes just a little. He could barely see the blue between her lids.

"Don't go again," was all she said, and then she sank into that quiet, drunken sleep, heavy and warm against his chest.

Haymitch's pained whisper went unheard. "Sure, princess. Like that's up to me."

He pressed his lips to her head and set the glass down gently on the carpet, for no matter how brilliant those diamond shards appeared in his mind's eye, they would not be worth the pain. Then he held her closer to him, doing his best not to have any foresight into the next morning, and sighed.

It was a world-weary sigh, and justified in its depth. Effie heard it, took it in, and wove it into her dreams – she would remember it later as the saddest sound in the world.

He faded away on that breath, into darkness, into sleep.


End file.
